aaco

> It literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries.

This is the same constraint for the, let's call it, "peace on Earth" problem, or just "peace".

If only more of us could realize this is what it takes to solve that problem... which itself is part of the puzzle, i.e. how to increase awareness about the need to solve this.

While there are a number of people and organizations trying to do this, I see that there seems to be more possible fronts that could be used to tackle this and accelerating the reach for stability and sustainability of the state of peace.

One example of a possible front (and I honestly don't know if those already exist) is: through marketing it would be possible to influence people enough to be interested in the outcome of "peace on Earth" and pay some money for that, in a way that it doesn't feel like a donation, and more like an investment or maybe acquiring a service that would be hopefully realized in the coming years (hence the importance of the marketing capacity of that entity, as this mindset needs to be set in the consumers in order to make them buy the good).

Of course, the reporting to the consumers on the use of the invested money toward that effort has to be as transparent and honest as possible, as those approaches are arguably required for a sustainable state of peace. And hopefully it would make enough sense for an entity to operate in the way of the outcome it is seeking. Even though we are moving from a state of no-peace, which is hopefully unsustainable. In other words the effort could be be defined as "safely and confidently accelerating the maximum point of unsustainability of the no-peace state such that it inevitably transitions to a sustainable state of peace".

That's then possibly a private endeavor (not that it could not be a public one as well, but you need to raise enough money to pay for the possibly expensive marketing and then pay all of its employees), because there is now an identifiable market willing to pay some amount in exchange for obtaining the "product" of peace, which in other words just mean the modulation of humanity and its mindset in order for it to operate in such a way that it is always aligned to its own common good, or maximum known state of well-being, sustainably.

We already know that groups and individuals are not great at doing that, on average. So if an individual is not always able to operate towards its own good, or maybe some are but don't have access to the resources that would allow them to do so, how could then a group of individuals be able to do so? Unlikely.

And yes, exploring the universe and finding more about its mysteries and teaching humanity about them is a valid and great approach and a subset of all the possible approaches.

It is a subset because in order for an individual to be interested in knowing more about the mysteries of the universe, or consciousness and other topics, they have to have this mindset, well, set in the mind.

Therefore there are many more fronts that could be, and to many extents currently are, covered. So all I'm arguing here is we are not doing enough to reach the tipping point before possible big catastrophes happen, therefore we should do a lot more than what we're currently doing. There are many entity/company/organization models to explore that could benefit us in a spectrum of possibilities ranging from private to public.

This. The ability to easily reason about the code and manipulate it because its syntax is simple and predictable is the big deal to me.

I think this is analog to switching from Roman to Arabic numerals. The syntax is regular. No matter how big the number is the rules are the same. There are no exceptions. Hence doing calculations with the former is a lot clumsier than with the latter.

That's the ideal scenario at least. I do realize that math might not be as simple as it could be, but I'm not really qualified to argue about that. But what if we were still using Roman numerals today? Would we be at the level of understanding we are at right now? It seems to me that it's more or less the same thing when you start understanding Lisp and why it is the way it is.

This is just too big of a tradeoff to be ignored. In my experience choosing the simple and regular solutions paves the way to progress, in which useful things that look trivial now would be rightly discarded or would be viewed as too complex if our mental model were grounded on the previous clumsy framework.

Now, I'm not saying "just drop all your clumsy languages right now, because today we have a better idea, and start using Lisp". I certainly don't do that. I don't even work with Lisp. But my point is that not realizing that Lisp has some properties that make it special is perhaps hindering yourself of being able to see that some things can be a lot simpler than you thought they could be.

I agree with you here. The problem is that this is not directly obvious by only observing the upvote arrow. It might communicate more things than this, like "I agree with this comment." So, unless you tell them (and keep reinforcing this meaning), different people will read it differently.

I would even argue that it would be a good idea replacing the upvote arrow with a link named "I want to see more comments like this". That would stimulate more well thought, relevant comments, while agreeable/funny comments would still be there, but at the bottom of the page. These might be harmless, but they don't deserve lots of upvotes.

And what is his tribal name? Remember that he is the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. We would need to contact him in order to know that, right?

Both words translate to "Indian" in English. Maybe that is why the article calls him an Indian. What word would you use instead, "native", maybe?

Probably not, if by "offend" you mean "market research", but that is not what I'm talking about. I'm specifically talking about the method you proposed, which I don't find to be fair.

In your question, you seem to imply that "market research" as a whole is offensive, which is not what it seems to me. Look at the Dry Test (the method Tim Ferris wrote about) mentioned up in this thread. It seems fair enough to me, and you still get the email of the people who are interested in your product.

"if you always play by the rules you'll never make it."

I simply don't buy that. Do you really mean never?

Would you tell them "This product is no longer available for sale" when it never was? In fact it doesn't even exist.

Would it be fair to make people spend their time filling a form that won't result in anything?

Who can guarantee you did not collect the data submitted by the form?

It is.

"... pure Lisp ..."

There is no such a thing as "pure Lisp". Lisp is not a programming language, it's a family of programming languages that share some common properties.

To put it more clearly, we could represent Lisp and its members hierarchically:

    Lisp
        Common Lisp
            CLISP
            SBCL
            ...
        Scheme
            Racket
            Gambit
            Chicken
            ...
        Clojure
        ...

I think that HN, while not a college, might be a counterexample for this idea.

Here everyone can join and communicate, and yet we can maintain a high level of communication. The ones who don't fit are quickly flagged or simply won't come back again.

I think selectivity is good, however it doesn't need to be enforced in the admission step, it will happen in the middle of the process. People who would not be able to follow the course requirements would quickly drop out.

I'm not arguing that this idea would work (I don't really know), but based on the HN experience I think it should be considered.